Errors Rob Students And Teachers Of Precious Time
School textbooks for classes 6-10 issued by the Telangana State Council of Educational Research and Training (TSCERT) are riddled with spelling, grammatical and conceptual errors.
The mistakes have been detected by students, parents and teachers following a notification from the TSCERT seeking feedback on textbooks and curricula for 2016-17. An expert committee formed by it will review the feedback, submitted by the teachers’ forum, to revise curricula and textbooks for classes 1-10. Teachers say errors make it difficult for students to grasp a subject. “In maths, several problems have calculation errors or incorrect solutions. A publishing error consumes a lot of time for resolving a problem,“ says P Vijetha, a maths teacher.
Spelling mistakes are the most embarrassing of them all. Consecutive has been changed to `consecitive’, parallel to `parllel’ and scheme to `seheme’ on many pages. Also the contexts of many sentences have changed in language textbooks after translation.“A few textbooks have been translated verbatim from English to Telugu and Urdu, due to which the meanings of several sentences have changed. Reading and comprehension is a problem in language textbooks as errors mislead students,“ says M Samyukta, vice-president, School Teachers’ Federation of India.
Private schools also rue that textbooks printed by the TSCERT are outdated, with various topics covered at late stages.
The Telangana school education department and private school managements affiliated to the state board during the 2015-16 academic year were in a `textbook war’ as the later had refused to adopt government-prescribed textbooks. “Textbooks published by the government for primary classes (1-5) focus on alphabets, numbers, rhymes, how to write small sentences, etc. These topics are taught to children at the pre-school level (nursery, lower KG and upper KG), but books for that have not been prescribed or published by the government,“ says Sreenivas Reddy, president, Telangana Private School Management Association.
Private schools fear that if they continue to teach with government textbooks, parents may shift their wards to CBSE or ICSE-affiliated schools, which follow much advanced syllabi.
TSCERT says rectifying mistakes is an annual ritual.“Every year we rectify mistakes highlighted by teachers by issuing a notification. There is nothing new about it. But this year, apart from removing errors, we have decided to add new lessons in geography, social studies and science,“ says Jagannath Reddy, director, TSCERT.
Last year, the government revised the syllabus for Telugu and history by including various lessons related to the Telangana Movement, and the state’s art and culture, and by eliminating chapters related to Andhra Pradesh.
Source – Times of India – Hyderabad – 26th December 2016
